Burned by bosses’ gas scam

Cooking is a daily anxiety,” Karo told me. She was referring to M-Gas, a pre-paid cooking gas service operated by Safaricom — Kenya’s dominant telecommunications and digital payments company. Like most residents of Kibera, the largest informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Karo had previously relied on full gas cylinders and buckets of charcoal. Then Safaricom launched an aggressive marketing campaign in the area, advertising M-Gas as “affordable” — “pay as little as one shilling” — rather than purchasing a full cylinder upfront, which typically costs around 1,000 shillings.

Karo assumed M-Gas worked like Safaricom’s Lipa Mdogo Mdogo (“pay little by little”) scheme, a consumer loan program she already knew well. Her smartphone had been financed through it: 50 shillings a day for two years, ultimately costing her the equivalent of two phones had she paid in cash. When she once fell behind on payments, her phone was remotely locked. “It was a piece of iron,” she said. “So I thought I’d better finish the loan.”

With M-Gas, she quickly discovered the logic was the same — but the stakes were higher. A 50-shilling micropayment only covered enough gas for a single meal. A device attached to the cylinder would emit a beep when she was running low, a small alarm that had come to fill her with dread. “Sometimes I can’t even find 20 shillings in the house. My kids have to eat half-cooked meals.” Eventually, her oldest son ran the numbers: a full cylinder’s worth of M-Gas cost them 1,600 shillings — far more than a conventional cylinder. Karo went back to charcoal.

Two weeks later, she received a call from M-Gas. They told her they would repossess the cylinder and stove if she stopped using the service. The devices installed in her kitchen had been monitoring her cooking habits all along.

Karo’s situation is not an isolated one. The financialization of daily life — a process that accelerated across Western economies from the 1970s onward — has amounted to what Marxist theorists describe as the real subsumption of labor to finance capital: workers increasingly depend on mortgages, credit, and loans to meet basic needs, while banks and financial institutions steadily siphon income through rent and interest. What was once considered technically inapplicable to Africa’s poor — given that most lack a regular paycheck — is now being carried out anyway, adapted to extract value from even the most precarious livelihoods.

Kenya illustrates this dynamic sharply. Over 83 percent of the active workforce operates in the informal sector, and roughly 67 percent of young people between 18 and 34 are unemployed. This is the product of a particular trajectory of dispossession: as rural land was enclosed for capital accumulation, masses of workers left the countryside — only to find that urban industry had no place for them either. Stripped from the land but not absorbed into manufacturing, they became a surplus population, rendered structurally redundant by industrial capital yet increasingly legible as a market for financial capital. This is precisely why a communist revolution — one that strips the capitalist class of power and places the working class in control of the economy — is so critical in Africa and elsewhere.

It is in this context that Kenya’s celebrated identity as Africa’s “Silicon Savannah” takes on a more troubling character. Policymakers across the continent have enthusiastically embraced emerging technologies as engines of development and inclusion. But in practice, it is predatory financial technology — fintech — that has prospered most. Digital platforms and surveillance tools are deployed not to lift people out of poverty, but to manage and monetize it. The Lipa Mdogo Mdogo scheme is a case in point: unsecured loans extended to people who cannot offer wage collateral, in exchange for sweeping digital surveillance of their behavior and finances.

According to Oxfam Kenya’s 2025/2026 reports, 46 percent of Kenyans live in extreme poverty. Within that figure, consumer loans have become a routine mechanism for affording basic necessities — food, communication, cooking fuel — purchased in small, fragmented increments that ultimately cost far more in aggregate. The question this raises is not simply one of exploitative pricing, but of structural logic: how do laborers discarded as surplus by industrial capital become a profitable source of accumulation for financial capital? The answer, visible in Karo’s kitchen and millions like it, is through the digitization of debt — turning everyday survival into a metered, monitored, and monetized transaction. These schemes are making ordinary Kenyans poorer while concentrating wealth among a financial and political elite. Technological innovation, in this context, has not delivered inclusive prosperity — it has delivered a more efficient architecture of extraction. In Africa and elsewhere, the only solution to the rising poverty of the workers is communist revolution.
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Capitalism divides us

During our afterschool program, the students have many discussions. One student was discussing that her brother had just had a conversation during his program where another student was discussing how much racism she had encountered being Mexican and Chinese.

While she was discussing her experience, another student brought up how she was discriminated against for being a lesbian. However, this student was a white young woman. She was told her experience was different. 

A Progressive Labor Party member  brought up that racism causes half the profits business makes! It justifies paying one group of workers less than another. The white young woman would experience oppression for being a woman and for being gay.

The PLP member pointed out why it is important to not take an intersectional approach where each struggle is seen as an individual struggle, but to instead see all the struggles as related to capitalism. By focusing on the effects of an exploitative system, the young people can learn that the struggle against sexism and racism is the struggle against capitalism. Conversations like this sharpen our struggle and help us see that individualizing struggles into tidy intersections only helps the bosses to keep us divided.
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